


A Part From Yesterday

by PresquePommes



Category: Avatar: Legend of Korra
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Bittersweet, Character Growth, Character Meta, Gen, Growing Up, Humour, Some angst, Twins
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-05
Updated: 2015-01-05
Packaged: 2018-03-05 15:14:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,746
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3124883
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PresquePommes/pseuds/PresquePommes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It was inevitable that she would turn out a little funny, the way she was raised, but growing up and learning when to let go is hard for anyone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Part From Yesterday

**Author's Note:**

> I was joking about Eska with my brother and accidentally made myself sad by commenting that it's not actually that surprising that she's possessive and strange if you consider what her home life must've been like with Unalaq as a father.
> 
> Some headcanons, nothing to take too seriously. God knows if anyone will even read this.
> 
> This can be some sort of pre-Bolin/Eska thing if you really want it to be. Don't discount the importance of friendship born through mutual understanding, though.
> 
> Growing up is hard.

By the age of nineteen, Eska had only one secret from her brother, and that was that she was, and indeed always had been, the sort of girl who made a point of never letting anyone know that she was fully aware of just how miserable a life it was that she’d been living for those first sixteen years.

Being one half of a whole had as many advantages as it had disadvantages, just as it had as many disadvantages as it had advantages.

The two were often difficult to tell apart, just like the twins themselves.

Desna knew she’d been miserable because _he’d_ been miserable.

The difference between them was that he hadn’t realized until their father had forced him to.

She and Desna were, and always had been, inseparable, and so Desna assumed that she hadn’t realized how miserable she’d been until he had.

This was, as she had expected, both an advantage and a disadvantage.

It allowed her the comfort of some confidence that he would not stop to consider that she may have experienced things quite differently than he had.

Of course, it also created an uncomfortable possibility that she had never even thought to consider before: that Desna also had a secret he kept hidden from her.

She chose not to dwell on the possibility at length, in any case, and she refused to consider the possibility of his having secrets, _plural_ , but the rift between them was already made and there was nothing to be done about that.

Desna may not have recognized her self-awareness, but she knew couldn’t stop others from seeing more of her than she would have liked them to.

There would always be people who saw more of her than she would have liked them to, and she was slowly becoming resigned to that.

The world could not be full of Bolins.

She was resigned to the fact that as soon as she left the North and the accompanying mirage of assumptions about her behind, a small sliver of the uninitiated would look at her for the first time and see past her beautiful face and fine clothes and know them for the affectations of confidence they were.

She was resigned to the fact that sometimes the people of the mid-world would hear the halting, uninflected cadence of her speech and know it was neither intentional nor unconscious- even when they were finishing each other’s sentences or simply answering those questions the other had never asked aloud, she couldn’t hide the subtle differences between her awkward tongue and Desna’s, who genuinely did not care about being liked and could not be bothered pretending to be normal.

Eska could, in fact, be bothered.

Eska _was_ , in fact, quite bothered.

Eska was still learning how to talk to people without exerting herself over them like a tyrant.

While the habit did produce some very interesting results, they weren’t the results she wanted to see.

Breaking herself of it was turning out to be a long, hard process, and she knew she was making it harder than it should have been because so much of talking to people properly was about _trust_.

Eska and Desna had not been taught to trust- they had been taught to listen.

To obey.

To be loyal.

They had been extensions of their father’s will first and his children second.

She could not remember a time when her father had smiled down at her for reasons that had to do with who she was to him instead of what she had done for him.

Even their mother, who had taken the news of her husband’s death almost _too_ gracefully, though no one was foolish enough to say so aloud- their mother, whose wan pallor had grown dark and rich, whose tired eyes had turned lively, whose greying hair seemed suddenly to sparkle with strands of starlight, who seemed almost to have aged in reverse in the years that followed his death- came to mind as a sort of nothing person, more notable than their royal attendants only in title.

Eska sometimes closed her eyes in remembrance, but she never saw more than another distant shape in the faded background of her childhood memories.

She couldn’t remember the child called Eska’s mother as anything but a familiar stranger, a woman with polished hair and finely woven clothes simply too beaten down by the shadow of her husband’s ambition to be beautiful in more than form and figure.

She considered that others would find this sad.

She knew Bolin would cry if she ever saw fit to tell him.

She wondered if she was supposed to cry, too.

Their mother now was a very real presence in their lives, eager and loving but unsure how to mother a pair of adult children and uncertain at what point she would be overstepping her bounds as a subject of their shared chiefdom.

It didn’t matter. The damage of her absence had already been done. Eska did not blame her for that. Control and personal agency had been rationed amenities in their father’s household.

She did not blame Desna for his slow grasp of their sad reality, either.

As a child, she had held his shaking hand tightly under the table as he’d told their father that he had a son and a daughter rather than the identical girls he had supposed, and their father had been nothing if not overjoyed- a male heir was nothing to be taken for granted.

So she did not blame Desna for his fervent loyalty, nor did she find it difficult to understand why it had been so much easier for him to look at their father and see a great and loving man.

She had spent a great deal of her childhood looking through Desna’s eyes instead of her own. It made things considerably easier.

But things had changed. She no longer lived under the oppressive weight of both impossible expectations and complete indifference, and she no longer had to look through Desna’s eyes to persevere.

She was free.

Freedom was terrifying.

***

By the time Eska turned twenty, people had begun to annoy her with tentative questions about when she intended to marry.

She did not.

The thought of marriage brought only one face to mind, and she had relinquished her hold on him years before.

She told herself she did not regret it, and it was true when she thought about how difficult it would have been to learn to treat him properly when she’d already grown so accustomed to reigning over him like an icy whalehornet queen.

It ceased to be true when her chest constricted painfully and inexplicably at the thought of his guileless smile and warm eyes.

She wondered if his gentle nature had brought out the best or the worst in her.

She supposed she’d never know.

***

Two weeks after she and Desna turned twenty-one, Eska announced her intention to journey to Republic City.

She could tell Desna was slightly surprised by the news.

 _Why did you not tell me of this earlier?_ his eyes and the minutely downturned corners of his lips asked.

“I will inform the council of our future absence,” he answered after a moment, already turning away.

“No, brother,” she corrected him, as gently as she was able, a difference in inflection she knew only he would detect, “I will be journeying alone.” _Plus the necessary crew and attendants,_ she added without words. He could be tediously pedantic at times.

He met her eyes and held them, confused and cautiously alarmed.

_We have never been apart, sister._

They had not.

_We have been separated by walls, but never by oceans._

She knew.

She felt more than willed her eyes to soften. It was something they did rarely- once, only when she had looked upon him.

 _It is time, brother,_ she told him, laying her hand on top of his, _it is time to grow apart._

His face was trying to do something unfamiliar. She could feel her face trying to do the same, and leaned her forehead against his in solidarity.

_It is time to grow apart._

***

She was too old to lie to herself about her intentions.

She had not hunted him like she once might have, but she had looked for his face in every crowd and listened for his name in every passing conversation.

It was enough of a difference to reassure herself that she did not have to find him and was strong enough to choose not to seek him out if she did.

She was still young enough to lie to herself about her self-control, but too old to lie to herself about her intentions.

Their past relationship may have been more generally accepted rumour than common knowledge, making it the sort of old news no one cared enough about to bring up, but her position as a chief of the Northern Water Tribe put her in the sort of social circles where hearing news of the current endeavors of a retired pro-bender, mover star, and long-time friend of the Avatar was inevitable.

She was, to be completely fair, slightly taken aback to find he was currently _in_ Republic City.

“I had thought he would be accompanying his girlfriend,” she commented, adding, “the airbender,” somewhat awkwardly when she remembered that others could not predict her thoughts as Desna could.

She felt the familiar dull ache of his absence and wondered, again, if she had made a mistake.

The sudden curiosity on the faces surrounding her alerted her to her error- by expressing interest in his current relationship, she had reminded them of the alleged connection between the two of them. She stared back at them silently.

“Um,” a serene-looking woman in Fire Nation colours and an unusually pale tiger monkey fur stole started, “I’m not… entirely certain what became of her, actually.” She twirled an artfully stray weft of dark hair around her finger contemplatively for a moment. Eska noticed with some amusement that the curved claws on her stole were lacquered in the same shade of blackened plum as the ones tipping her fingers. “Bolin’s been doing humanitarian work in the city core for a couple of years now, I think.”

“Oh, don’t call it humanitarian work,” an Earth Nation diplomat with a somewhat humorously oversized hair ornament scolded, his moustache twitching indignantly. “You make it sound like he’s saving nesting dragon doves, not feeding children.”

“I think you’ve misunderstood what humanitarian work entails, sir,” an understandably exasperated young woman in plain yellow slacks and a green tunic interjected gently.

Eska could feel her patience slipping from her grasp like so much water beading on the side of a Southern ice fountain on some particularly warm day.

“Thank you for your assistance. Goodbye,” she told them, interrupting the conversation to bow stiffly and walk briskly away.

She did not see the bewildered looks they sent after her, nor hear the Earth Nation diplomat’s faltering call for her to come back.

If she had, she may have taken some comfort in how much her paltry social skills seemed to have improved, or perhaps simply realized that she was much less intimidating to others without her brother beside her.

***

She could not even feign having found him accidentally- she had been forced to seek out the specifics of his current engagements to know where it was he was working, which made it rather difficult to convince herself that the urge was only idle curiosity.

She had not been expecting such a plain building, nor how imposing she would find it.

She lingered outside for far longer than was probably excusable.

The sky was beginning to turn russet towards the horizon and a soft, strange colour above.

A boy of eleven or twelve dressed in flimsy, too-large clothes was looking at her. He had been for a while.

She looked back.

“Are you gonna go in, or what?” he asked her rudely, shuffling out of the shadows.

“Are you?” she answered.

He wrinkled his dark little nose at her. “No.” His feet were bare. She frowned. The sidewalk was warmer than the ground she was used to, but not warm enough. “If I go in there, he’s gonna make me talk about stuff, and then he’s gonna cry.” He struck a slightly silly pose. It took her a moment to realize he was trying to appear self-assured. “Everybody always cries. You’d cry, too.”

“I do not cry,” she assured him, though she knew the man inside would be able to assure the boy this was a lie.

The boy stepped cautiously closer and squinted at her. “Nah, you’re all… fancy and stuff. Fancy people cry too much,” he dismissed confidently.

“I do not cry,” she repeated, mostly for a lack of anything else to say.

The boy crossed her arms and told her first that he had been kidnapped by a firebending circus troupe and forced to jump through flaming hoops while being chased by badgermoles to entertain rich fire sages in the underground of Ba Sing Se.

She looked at him, raising an eyebrow.

The boy began to tap his foot and told her second that he had been born on a pirate ship and raised alongside the Captain’s iguana parrot until they were attacked by a United Forces battleship and he was taken hostage, only escaping when the ship made port in Republic City.

She raised her other eyebrow.

He fidgeted and shivered and drew into himself and told her, finally, in a very small voice, that his mother had worked in one of the power plants until the accident.

“My dad’s in the Triple Threats,” he told her miserably. “He don’t want to know me at all.”

True to her word, she did not cry.

Instead, she patted his head somewhat awkwardly. “My father attempted to kill Avatar Korra and immerse the world in ten thousand years of darkness,” she comforted. “These things happen.”

She wasn’t expecting him to wrap his arms around her waist and begin to cry, but she did not push him away.

As she continued to pat his head like one would a turtle seal pup, she did think it was rather hypocritical of him, but she was starting to consider that perhaps all children were.

***

She found herself coming back again and again to the little grey building she’d never entered, and without realizing it, she became so accustomed to seeing the boy who hated tears that when she finally didn’t, she was struck by an unexpected sense of wrongness.

She was simultaneously relieved and annoyed to see him on the other side of those warmly-lit windows.

She began to contemplate the possibility that it could be a sign for her to stop coming, and then the boy pointed at her, and the person he had been talking to stepped forward and peered out.

As his eyes caught her, she froze, suddenly struck by the unprecedented and totally alien urge to flee.

She’d made it a good portion of the distance to the corner when someone called her name.

“Eska?”

She hesitated without meaning to, looking over her shoulder despite herself.

His face lit up in a way she wasn’t sure it ever had for her before. “Eska!”

She struggled momentarily and then turned, opting to salvage what little dignity she possibly could.

She started to raise a hand in polite acknowledgement, but didn’t even have the chance to speak before he’d enveloped her in a slightly overwhelming embrace.

“It’s you!” he cried, which she found rather redundant, as she was fairly certain they had already established that, as was his following cry of, “you’re here!”

When he took her face in his hands, she wondered absurdly if there was some truth to the legend that an earthbender’s touch could stop a woman’s heart.

She dismissed the idea shortly after, as she did not seem to have died, as far as she could tell.

“You’re here,” Bolin repeated, “in Republic City!”

“I am here,” she confirmed. “In Republic City.”

His face fell so suddenly that she wondered if she’d somehow managed to say something wrong without knowing it.

“Where’s Desna?” he asked, hands dropping to her shoulders with an absentminded familiarity that may not have proven fatal, but certainly felt bad for her health. “Oh- oh man, oh no, did something happen? Is someone attacking the Northern Water Tribe? Did UnaVaatu rise from the grave? I _knew_ this weird sky wasn’t just light pollution, Mako never listens to-”

“Desna is well,” she interrupted, resorting again to awkward patting as a calming method. “He is at home, fulfilling his duties as a chief of the Northern Water Tribe. I am alone.”

 “You came to Republic City all alone?” he asked her softly, eyebrows knitting. He continued to look at her for long enough that she began to form the nervous theory that his powers of perception had increased greatly since their last encounter. “You two didn’t fight, did you?”

She couldn’t restrain her exasperation. “No. Desna and I do not fight.”

He made a face that she could not describe as anything but characteristically _Bolin_ and threw an arm around her shoulders, steering her back towards the building he’d come out of. “ _All_ siblings fight, it’s like,” he protested, gesturing vaguely with his free hand, “just something siblings are supposed to _do_. I mean, Mako and I still get into fights about little stuff all the time, that’s normal- not that I’m saying you’re not normal, I mean- but I guess you’re twins, right? So maybe there’s a twin thing- uh, not that twins aren’t normal! I didn’t mean it like that-”

She was surprised to find herself smiling.

 _I missed you_ , she said without words, and he did not hear her, which was precisely what she’d wanted, anyway.

***

“Where is your airbender girlfriend?”

She hadn’t really intended to be so direct.

He’d spent the better part of the evening dragging her through the youth centre he’d founded and introducing her to people whose names she had immediately forgotten before suddenly realizing that he’d taken up a great deal of her time without asking.

His solution had been to insist on feeding her. She was somewhat at a loss to see how taking up more of her time was meant to compensate her, but not inclined to complain.

Without a brother to share her drinks with, she discovered that Fire Nation-brewed beverages were much more potent than she’d remembered or accounted for.

The words just came tumbling out.

Bolin just looked at her for a moment, pausing mid-chew to think.

“Opal?” he said around his mouthful.

She nodded.

He swallowed, apparently quite painfully, and looked down at his plate. “She’s with the other airbenders, taking supplies to some of the poorer states in the Earth Nation,” he answered, voice still cheerful but a little strange.

She couldn’t quite figure out how to word her thoughts.

“You are not with her,” she accused instead, and then took refuge in her fluted glass of sweet liqueur, which seemed to have mysteriously refilled itself while she was distracted.

He smiled at her, but it wasn’t a proper Bolin smile, and she didn’t want to see it.

“Yeah,” he sighed, pushing noodles around in his bowl.

The mood was intolerably sad for approximately fifteen seconds, and then his fire ferret squirmed out of the collar of his shirt and snatched a bread roll from his side plate.

“Pabu!” he hissed, stuffing the animal back in. “You can’t come out in here, we’ll get kicked out- look, I’ll give you another roll, so just be good, okay?”

Halfway through shoving a bread roll down his shirt, he seemed to recall that she was there, and went spectacularly pink.

She hid her smile in her napkin, glad for the distraction.

The server refilled her barely-emptied glass surreptitiously and eyed the lump in Bolin’s shirt suspiciously before leaving.

Bolin watched him go with a faraway look.

“I was gonna go with her,” he admitted suddenly. “But I guess I just sort of realized that traveling the world and helping people was _her_ dream, not mine.” His eyes were too earnest to hold, but impossible to look away from. “I grew up here, in Republic City, and one day when we were talking I just… sort of looked at her and realized that the people I wanna help aren’t out there-” He made a sweeping gesture, nearly knocking his glass off of the edge of the table.

Their server reappeared from seemingly nowhere to catch it and shot him a disapproving look before disappearing again. Bolin tucked his arms against his sides. Eska suspected he was sitting on his hands.

“They’re _here_ ,” he mumbled, a little subdued by embarrassment. “Mako and I grew up on these streets, and yeah, everything’s great right now for both of us, but… there are still kids out there like us, you know?”

She wasn’t sure if he actually expected her to respond to that. She opted to fold her hands on her lap and say nothing.

He didn’t seem discouraged.

“I just sort of looked at her one day and realized that for both of us to be happy, we had to go in different directions,” he shrugged, hands drifting back to his utensils. “And this time, we had to realize it wasn’t gonna be a temporary space between us, like it was before- Republic City’s my home, but it’s never going to be hers. I still love her,” he confessed, sounding a little sheepish, “but that’s why I couldn’t make her miserable, you know? I had to let go.”

She looked at him and felt strange in a thousand ways she’d never have the ability to articulate.

“I am familiar with that feeling,” she told him, head buzzing and chest heavy and tight all at once.

When he met her eyes again, she thought he’d understood her.

He leaned forward, expression sad in a way that looked a little too much like an apology she didn’t want to hear.

What he said instead was,

“Oh man, neither of us are having much luck, are we? I didn’t know you were seeing anybody- who was he? Do I know him?”

And Eska supposed she really had changed more than she’d ever realized, because even the sound of her own laugh sounded strange to her ears.


End file.
